Email Outage Update

Thanks for the update.

Isn't it a bit silly that, as far as I can tell, entire regions are without access to their email now? Was the email only hosted on 1 server without backups or without any type of redundancy or something? I've seen gmail go down for moments, such as when a server box crashes, but the redundancy of multiple servers across many different regions (many times cloud based) handle that issue. I understand they're working to fix the issue, but what is "the issue" in the first place? To me it appears to be very poor planning for either a server issue or no backups, to me that's a big "no no" when it comes to any type of hosting; backup, backup, backup and many times over redundancy to avoid completely going offline.

Let's assume for a moment that there's more than 1 server, and it's in different locations. That would imply that this issue is affecting different regions (wouldnt be something such as a power outage w/o a diesel backup). Considering the normal web mail access in pop is "east" "central" "west" and primarily central/east are affected, it wouldn't surprise me if email was literally all running off one major server, and when there's an issue with that one it completely takes down the system across the board, thus why everyone is affected. This is compared to let's say one specific region or such was down temporarily and then redirected through another server in a different location.

Frankly at this point I'm a bit irritated. My primary email is not cox, for this reason alone with down times and issues and no explanation to the paying customer. Can you imagine the headlines if this was gmail, or yahoo that went down? These "updates" aren't updates, they just keep saying "we're working on the issue" and then keep bumping more and more time into having to wait for a fix. The fix is have more email servers and redundancy and then you won't have a complete outage like this. I'm disgusted in this time and age that a service like this can be down for so long and there be no plan set in place, no backups, no redundancy, no failsafe or anything. On top of this, this leads me to believe maybe our personal information is getting out? What reliable information do I have that this wasn't caused by someone or that my information is still secure. "We have no indication of any security breach that would put customer information at risk". This implies it was hardware failure, which means they weren't running backups, and didn't have a contingency plan. My hope is they get this up soon, as a loyal multiple year+ cox customer, this is saddening :(.

no time estimate this time? will we be credited on our bills?

Oh, sure. You have "run a 30-second spot every single commercial break" money, but you don't have "making sure our personal information is secure and that e-mail servers retain data older than 150 days or even have 95% up time" money.

This outage has completely screwed me with one of my college class finals. I had to email my professor from my verified email account that had been verified in August with the answers to my final exam.

These answers were due by Midnight yesterday. Email crapped out at 5:00 or 6:00 pm and has been out ever since and I have no way of contacting my professor without my email.

Thank you for screwing my semester and costing me about $500 Cox.

Hello FiOs, when can you be here?

Are you going to refund some of our money since we are without e-mail for so long?  I'm NOT happy with your slow service and this is the final straw.  Get your act together or give us back our money. 

We ARE going to be credited for the time the email  is  / was down.......  WON'T WE??????

Will a billing credit or adjustment be made for over 24hrs of e-mail interruption?

I'm more concerned with the lack of information and explanation given to us and that our personal info could have been compromised versus a few dollar credit.

gerri said:

We ARE going to be credited for the time the email  is  / was down.......  WON'T WE??????

Since Cox considers email to be a free service there will be no refunds.... but of course they "sincerely" apologize for the inconvenience and all technical teams are fully engaged and committed to restoring service as quickly as they can.

Enjoy your next bill... and be sure it's paid on time because monopoly Cox is prepared to act in defense of its money- not just pay lip service to it like it does to customer service.

This is starting to be a concern for Security.......................but thanks for the updates.

This is infuriating.

What the heck can be wrong that each update now moves the time that service will be restored by twelve hours or so, with no end in sight.  And not even the decency to tell us what the problem is.

Another two days of this and I am gone as a Cox customer forever.

Just read on another forum that there are reports of Cox email having been hacked. Not good, not good at all.

Apology is useless. Going on second day of outage with now explanation of the problem or hope of resolution is outrageous. I'll be looking for better service elsewhere. Why would I want to bundle?

Actually, for at least part of this outage I have been able to send email.  That's how I was able to tell my real estate agent to use my gmail and yahoo address to forward a time sensitive contract offer to me.  It worked.

What was really weird, it seems that I also received it in my cox account after forwarding from gmail???

OTC